Solovki prison camp

The Solovki prison camp (later Solovki prison), located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, was a large forced labor camp for political prisoners of Imperial Russia, and later the Soviet Union. During the Soviet era, as "Solovki Special Purpose Camp" it became a model where the NKVD developed and tested security measures, "living conditions", work production norms for prisoners, and different methods of repression. The exact number of prisoners who went through the camp during 1923–1939 is still unknown, but estimates range between tens and hundreds of thousands.[1] It was the "mother of the GULAG" according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He estimated that in 1923 there were "no more than 3,000" prisoners, but that by 1930 the number had jumped to "about 50,000" with another 30,000 imprisoned at the nearby railroad transit point of Kem.[2]

By Lenin's decree, the monastery buildings were turned into Solovetsky Lager' Osobogo Naznachenia (SLON),[3] that is, the "Solovki Special Purpose Camp". The acronym of the camp name is a sullen word play for those who speak Russian: slon means "elephant". It was one of the first "corrective labor camps", a prototype of the Gulag system.[4] In the beginning of 1924 sometimes the double name was used Severnye (Solovetskiye) Lagerya OGPU (Northern (Solvki) camps of OGPU).[5]

Solovetsky Monastery in 2013

In 1926 the Solovki camp was turned into a prison, partly because of the conditions which made escape near-impossible and partly because the monastery had been used as a political prison by the Russian imperial administration. The treatment of the prisoners attracted much criticism in Western Europe and the USA. After a thorough cleanup, the Soviet government sent the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky to the camp in an attempt to counter this criticism and he wrote a very favourable essay, which praised the beautiful nature of the islands. He is believed by some authors to have understood the real conditions, but the full facts remain a mystery.[6][7]

The prison was closed in 1939 because the Second World War was imminent, while the camp was situated close to the border with Finland. The buildings were then transformed into a naval base. The navy cadet corps was deployed in the monastery buildings, one of the notable cadets was the future author Valentin Pikul.

The Orthodox Church reestablished the monastery in 1992, the year when the ensemble was included into UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Vladimir V. Tchernavin was a prisoner in the camp in the early 1930s. He has described his experiences there in his 1934 book I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets which he published after his escape abroad.

In The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Ponyrov (the poet also known as Ivan Homeless) suggests to Woland (a German name for Satan) that Immanuel Kant should be sent to Solovki as punishment for his attempts to prove the existence of God. Woland replies "Thats just the place for him! I told him so that day at breakfast...[However] It is impossible to send him to Solovki for the simple reason that he has resided for the past hundred-odd years in places considerably more remote than Solovki, and, I assure you, it is quite impossible to get him out of there."

Marina Goldovskaya's 1987 documentary film Solovky Power explores the camp at Solovki and its status as the first of the Soviet labour camps. It features interviews with former prisoners, including D. S. Likhachev.

Yugoslav communist Karlo Stajner served a part of his sentence in Solovki camp. He described his experiences in his book "7000 days in Siberia" [11]